“CLOAKING” CONTENT FOR SEO (OR WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOUR SEO COMPANY ISN’T TELLING WHAT THEY’RE UP TO)

This article contains scenes of a technical nature and has been rated ‘G’ for Geeks.

We recently built a pretty natty website for a client (who we’re not going to name!) who then went elsewhere to get their SEO and PPC. No crime there – there are bigger agencies out there, cheaper agencies, even better-looking agencies and all manner of options to take.

Having suffered a bit of rankings lapse, they came in to talk to us about their site in general, so we took the opportunity to look at their site to see what had been done. The results were a textbook example of the techniques employed at the shadier end of the market to hide content from visitors to the site, but let the search engines to find it.

We expose these techniques here to give you a bit of a warning what to expect if your SEO company won’t tell you what they are doing to your site. If you ask us to do this kind of thing, you’ll get a polite ‘no’.

SEO Crime 1: Hiding content from human visitors

The first rule of Google is: "make sure you have some content". Content is the soil in which good rankings thrive and it is very hard to rank a site unless you’ve invested in decent information with which to fill it. What was strange about this site was that it was ranking for a few terms despite only having 4, pretty much content-free, pages.

The first clue came when we looked at the site with the visual styling turned off. At the bottom of each page were 5 great big paragraphs of text about the company’s products, stuffed with keywords and heading tags that increase the prominence of those words. None of this was visible if you looked at the site as God (i.e. Johnny Wright) intended.

This is a huge no-no as far as Google are concerned. They want to place real content in front of site visitors and ‘hiding’ that from view defeats the object of that noble ambition.

SEO Crime 2: Hiding content using Javascript

You can, if you’re that way inclined, hide content from Google by accessing the DOM through javascript and altering its properties. That’s geek-speak for “doing shady stuff”. If you want technical stuff, read on, but you can skip to point 3 for something written in the Queen’s English.

There was a lot of newly-minted javascript kicking around in the source code, but the bit that caught my eye was this:

cstring = 'newresourceextranoted'
cdisplay = cstring.substring(16,17) + cstring.substring(17,18) + cstring.substring(0,1) + cstring.substring(19,20) ;
document.getElementById('resources88742').style.display = cdisplay;

What’s going on here? Well the last line of that block of code sets the display state of some content. The easiest way to do this would be set “style.display = ‘none’” or “set.style.display=’block’. If you’re trying to hide content, this is laughably easy for Google’s spiders to detect, so the SEO went around the houses to get the same result.

“Cdisplay” is a variable, which gave the SEO company a way to turn something that looked (vaguely) legit into something a little dicier. The content of ‘cdisplay’ is then created from a substring of letters in another variable called cstring. Cstring has been assigned the value ‘newresourceextranoted’ and the substring elements taken from it are characters 17 (‘n’), character 18 (‘o’), character 1 (‘n’) and character 20 (‘e’). Yep – it’s a highly convoluted way of spelling ‘none’, and there’s no reason to do that unless you’re up to something you’d rather the search engines didn’t see.

SEO Crime 3: Copying content from Wikipedia (and sundry other sources)

All this rigmarole was undertaken to hide some content. But this content itself was basically retrodden stuff from a thousand sources.

Type in one of the phrases from the text into Google, and this is what you get.

Lots of people have added pretty much exactly the same block of information, meaning it’s been copied a thousand times from one originating source and changed it only slightly.

Basically, the content is valueless. For sure, the story of rubber is the story of rubber – there’s only so much you can say about it – but you can reposition it in a more interesting light or make a much greater effort to rewrite it than these clowns did. Not only does that make a more interesting site but it avoids the danger of getting a duplicate content penalty for Google (who are very keen on this kind of stuff).

So if the company in question aren’t penalised for hiding content, then they will one day be dragged down by their low value of that content. As sure as eggs is eggs.

And the results are…?

Actually at the time of writing, the site is ranking for a couple of it’s chosen keywords. That’s great for the customer and we’re sure they’re happy with the custom those rankings bring to their business. But here’s the rub: because their SEO agency have gone down this route they could not only lose those rankings, but all their rankings at any moment. It all looks very convoluted on paper, but it took me about 2 minutes to unravel what they were doing.

If one of their competitors hires an SEO, the first thing they’ll do will be look at this site, come to the same conclusions that I did and report the site to Google. That means a 50/50 chance that see the site will be removed from Google’s index all together, and the company will be have to go down the pay per click route in order to win new business. In these economic times, few companies can afford to start playing so fast and loose with their margins.

Today’s Moral?

We’ve said it before. If your SEO company can’t/won’t tell you what they’re doing with your money then think very carefully about whether you should continue to work with them. If they’re using techniques like those outlined above to ‘fool’ the search engines into giving them decent rankings then they are playing with the very future of your online business.

(If we're going to be brazen about it, contact someone reputable today!)
 

Notes and Queries...

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